We’ll Be Right Back

[Images from Walla News in Israel]

Some more pictures from Israel’s occupation of Gaza – but there’s nothing to see here, folks, Israel’s an honourable country with an honourable army – right? Right? Um, yeah…

We’ll be Right Back

Soldier having his picture taken in a Palestinian family’s kitchen

The PR Machine kicks in – but for what purpose?

So the Israeli PR machine is kicking into action – though one wonders what the point of it all is. As writers well know, one can only create an illusion with words if the reader already agrees to enter into the illusion. No doubt Israelis will buy it. Everyone else, though…

For one thing, the attack on the ships has been called a “”tangle at sea” by the TV news. A “tangle”. I like that. Just an itty bitty little knot there, don’t look, we’ll make it disappear.

And of course, Israel will speak as Israel. Well, you know what? I’m Israel too. So here’s what Israel would like to say:

This was a criminal, insane, stupid and murderous attack. The blockade of Gaza is criminal, insane, stupid and, yes, murderous. It needs to be stopped. Immediately. And we know we were criminal, insane, stupid and murderous, but we think we can send out enough press releases to explain how it had all been a misunderstanding and we’re the good guys. Really.

I’m still speechless. Watching Israeli news is like watching bad propaganda films from the 1940s. Grow up, Israel! Take fucking responsibility, for once in your life!

The irony is that the flotilla worked. It did what it was meant to do. It drew the world’s attention to what Israel is doing on a daily basis to the Palestinians. And all it cost was for a bunch of people to die at the hands of innocent Israeli commandos who were senselessly attacked by the ruthless people whose ships they boarded like pirates.

The other sad thing? It won’t do a damn thing. Not with Netanyahu, not with Barak, not with the vast majority of people who voted them in. Israel will never recognise the wrong it is causing. Because to do so would be to negate the fiction of Israel itself. A narrative so fascinating, so fictional that the entire paid-for-by-taxes Israeli PR machine is now churning more copy to contribute to it.

Ok, that’s my last post for today. I’m too pissed off, too angry. I want to know the names of the people who died. I want to see the Israeli government resign in disgust. And I want to switch off the TV and pretend I live in a sane country. Wish in one hand, shit in the other, and see which one fills up first.

More tomorrow, probably.

Stupid quote of the day so far

Ehud Barak, former army chief of staff, former prime minister, current defense minister and still, even after all these years, a moron:

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in a press conference on Monday that while he was sorry for lives lost, the organizers of the Gaza-bound protest flotilla were solely responsible for the outcome of the fatal IDF raid earlier in the day.”

He called the flotilla a provocation, specifically called the IHH, an Islamic aid organization, “extremist supporters of terror.” - Jerusalem Post

Q: So when Barak calls the organisers “extremist supporters of terror” does that mean they voted for him in the last Israeli elections?

Q2: Can “They made us kill them so it’s their fault” be used as justification in a murder trial?

Q3: Is “moron” considered bad language? If so, should bloggers using it about Ehud Barak be shot?

What writers do

According to the BBC, Swedish author Henning Mankell was/is on board one of the ships.

I wish I had his guts.

I wish I wasn’t afraid of being shot.

What writers do and what writers should do are often different things. We’re not creatures of action, as a rule. Our method of confrontation is words on paper, not face-to-face. And to a great extent that is how writers should voice themselves. It’s what they’re good at, after all.

Right now on Israeli TV, one of the generals came on to explain that the IDF soldiers were attacked and therefore had to protect themselves. Let me repeat that. The IDF soldiers who attacked the ships were under attack and had to use force.

Orwell would have been so proud.

TV and newspaper double-speak is the order of the day. The soldiers had to defend themselves. The same general on TV said that, when the flotilla organisers were told not to approach Gaza, they replied in “an inappropriate manner I don’t want to repeat here”.

My God. Did they? Why not, I don’t know, shoot them? They made us do it, seems to be the consensus.

And they used bad language!

I hope they said Fuck you, just before you gave the order to attack.

Sick, disgusted and horrified

I woke up to the news about the attack on the Gaza aid flotilla. I’ve been in Israel for about 3 months. I thought I could do it. Now I’m not so sure. I am so sick, disgusted and horrified by the news this morning, that I can find nothing to say. One thing though – I don’t think that I can afford to keep quiet any more about the decades-long abuse of power, the daily oppression and the militant right-wing psychotic policies of Israel any longer.

It’s scary to voice an opinion. One fears violent responses, night-time visits, or simply online attacks for saying what Israelis don’t want to hear: that they are wrong, so terribly, terribly wrong, that they have learned nothing from the past and in the interests of becoming a state have forgotten what it means to be human.

This is stuff I try to engage with in my fiction, not on my blog. I am under no illusions that anything I write can change anything. There is no one to talk to over here. Opinions are parroted endlessly, the news is pure propaganda: Iran is Evil, the Palestinians are homicidal maniacs and everything is done for the protection of the state.

No more.

I’ve had enough keeping quiet.

Nothing will change in this country unless people begin to see what they are doing. To themselves, to others. Israel has been losing its humanity for decades in pursuit of a fiction created and nurtured, a fictional history in which Palestinians “escaped” or “left” their homes, in which wars are always someone else’s fault and in which the fanatics of Masada are worshipped 2000 years after they committed mass suicide. Masada is a metaphor for Israel, and the irony is that it is celebrated here.

I should be writing today. I should be completing an interview for SF Signal, going over a just-completed novel, polishing off some short stories, finishing another section on that comics project. Working on the new novel, too. Instead I’m sitting here staring at the screen wondering how I can be here, and what sort of person I’d be if I kept quiet.

What happened this morning is criminal. And if this country had any law, the people responsible for the attacks on the ships would go to trial. But no: the politicians will shout and posture and blame everyone else for starting it, or they’ll blame Iran, because that’s the default response. It’s only a matter of time. A country ruled by generals and corrupt incompetents (former president a convicted sex offender, former prime minister on charges of massive corruption) will not examine itself, will not purge itself of the evil it does.

It will simply blame Iran, or Hamas, or little green aliens.

I’m sick, horrified, disgusted – but not surprised.

I wish I had been.